Sandrine Piau review: Soprano's debut enchants

MUSIC REVIEW

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Photo: Antoine Le Grand

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Soprano Sandrine Piau

Soprano Sandrine Piau

Photo: Antoine Le Grand

Sandrine Piau review: Soprano's debut enchants

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The French soprano Sandrine Piau, who made an enchanting recital debut in Berkeley's Hertz Hall on Sunday afternoon, is best known for her work in the Baroque and Classical periods. But this program, presented by Cal Performances, found her pushing further into the modern era, with largely delightful results.

Piau's great strength is her sleek and elegant phrasing, marked by smooth legato and plush vocal tone. At her finest, she sings with notable warmth and radiance, endowing a melodic line with a kind of shimmery grace that doesn't impede the clarity of either rhythm or diction.

In consecutive sets of songs by Fauré and Chausson, Piau sang with shapely urgency, a combination of fluidity and strength that made the music seem to reach out and gently engage the listener. The lyrical phrases of Fauré's "Après un rêve" ("After a Dream") emerged with sinuous directness, and "Les Heures" ("The Hours"), Chausson's haunting meditation on time and mortality, was superbly rendered.

Issues of scale and balance, though, ran like a worrisome undercurrent through the afternoon. As long as Piau's artistry was focused on intimate moments, all was well, but in larger and more forceful passages, her sound tended to fade away.

The opening set of Mendelssohn songs, for instance, were nimbly done - especially "Hexenlied" ("Witches' Song"), the composer's gothic reply to Schubert's "Erlkönig" - but Piau's graceful filament of tone was often overpowered. Pianist Susan Manoff made things no easier by thundering her way through the accompaniments. A Richard Strauss set, aside from a luminous and exquisitely paced "Morgen" ("Tomorrow") faced some of the same problems.

Fortunately, the material in the program's second half drew more consistently on Piau's strengths. "Galgenlieder" ("Gallows Songs"), Vincent Bouchot's 2009 settings of mordant quasi-children's rhymes by Christian Morgenstern, were a fascinating revelation, their crystalline, quick-witted texts set to translucent music.

Piau and Manoff performed them with incisive restraint to set up the more expansive beauties of the Poulenc set that followed, including a swaggering "Montparnasse" and a sumptuous account of "C" that skirted sentimentality. Three of Britten's Folk Song Arrangements brought the recital to a lovely close.